Music Streaming Loudness Comparison

Here Jonathan talks about loudness (aka: average volume) and how streaming services are changing the volume of songs to match their loudness and the best way to get your music sounding great on Spotify and iTunes Radio.

One of the biggest conversations we always have during the mastering process with our clients is, “How loud do you want to make it?”. The answer is almost always, “As loud as possible!”. Humans are naturally attracted to loud noises and we understand that without ruining the audio quality.

Streaming music services like Spotify have a limiter in place by default. Users can turn it off but the goal is to create an average level of loudness between modern music and older music. The result of this to the end user and listener is that older tracks will be presented with a greater dynamic range than more modern music. The reason for this is that the older tracks were not mastered so loud.

So what should you do? During the mastering process it is worth considering having one version of a track for streaming music services, one for download and another for CD.

We can advise your further based on your needs. Please watch the video for more information.